The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Rev. Dr. George Sumner: Sermon for Holy Eucharist During Annual Convention, January 26, 2008, St Bartholomew’s Church Nashville

My daughter was 13 and we were walking down University Avenue at the heart of our home city of Toronto. The sun was shining and I was quite happy, maybe humming to myself.. until I noticed that she was walking two paces behind. I asked what I had done to incur her displeasure, and shaking her head she replied “I can’t take it, you’re just so…well… you.” Maybe you’ve been there. By 15 she wouldn’t listen to much advice from my quarter, by 17 I was better but mom got the roll of the eyes. Is all this sounding familiar yet? My daughter was blessed at the right time with a great youth minister, kept on her Christian journey, and today, at 19, does enter an Episcopal Church, if occasionally, and into her university Inter-Varsity group quite often. I am happy to report she now walks next to me, though she insists on calling me “George.”

My wife and I spent the early years of our ministry teaching in east Africa, and years later, through those challenging teenaged years we often commented on the wisdom of our African friends when it came to child-raising. You see, they have built into the way they understand family a solution for the 13-year-old. They have a special word for the maternal uncle, the Njomba, and for the paternal aunt, the Shangazi, setting them apart as the ones who take over parenting in the delicate years when our children are trying to break free. A watchful eye, a familial bond, a wise word, but one step removed- makes all the difference.

This is the feast of Sts. Timothy and Titus. Now Timothy was a young adult, one who grew up in the faith, and he has now become a budding Church leader. It is in short, the feast of the rising generation of Christian leaders, of raising the young in the faith and for ministry. It is the occasion for you as the Diocese of Tennessee to ask anew what is required for us to see a new generation of Timothys in our churches. To this end let us look at our Epistle reading, the opening verses from Paul’s second letter to Timothy, for guidance. At the very outset Paul tells us that he is an apostle, one sent with a message. That message does not change; it is the promise of eternal life that comes from faith in Jesus Christ. It is the same for every age, generation, and culture. By grace, by God’s pure gift, all are given that promise and then called, we are told, into service. Now the promise does not change over time, but the need to pass it on does, from the old to the young, from generation to generation. You have no doubt heard the saying that with each generation the faith faces extinction- if it is not passed on. That is why back in the book of Deuteronomy we are commanded by God through Moses to teach that faith to the young as we rise and sleep, going out and coming in, embedding it in our very houses and putting in always before our eyes. It is the great spiritual obligation for fathers and mothers for their sons and daughters.

With this duty in mind, consider the term “apostolic succession.” It is a phrase that has caused great debate in the Christian tradition. Of what does it consist, a long chain of hands in consecration? Or the passing on of the faith of the apostles generation to generation? Well, both of course, the first being a symbol of the second. But I want to use the expression in a somewhat different, twofold way. Apostolic succession- passing on the faith that goes all the way back to the apostles- how does that happen? Note well that there are two kinds of lineage spoken of here in 2 Timothy 1. First mentioned is spiritual parenthood, Timothy being a beloved child to his spiritual father, his mentor, Paul. This kind of parenting is a continuation of the tradition Paul inherits from his forebears, Israel, who have preserved and passed on the Word of God. But Paul goes on, secondly, to talk, secondly, of literal, bloodline, familial, parenting. Timothy is a leader because of the nurture he received from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. (And we do well to note that the teaching here is matrilineal, as it has often been historically). Timothy has had two kinds of parenting, two lines of apostolic succession, two kinds of hands that have been laid on his head. First there is the household of faith. If we consider our own time, we can see that faith is conveyed here by services, classes, small groups, and fellowship, all guided by leaders, lay and ordained within the structure of the Church. This happened for Timothy too, but it should not stand alone. There is a second lineage. It consists of personal nurture, example, and witness. These are seen close up in day to day life, so that the young person can see whether or not the witness is, in Paul’s term,. unhypocritical. Lois and Eunice have walked the walk. Now this kind of succession happens for some believers in our own families, though for others, and for all of us from time to time, it is complemented by our extended family and close friends. This second succession is witness and nurture in the personal, institutionally unstructured web of relationships in which we live. Timothy had Christian parenting in a churchly way from Paul and in a familial way from Lois and Eunice. Hands were laid on his head of two kinds, and the joining of these two kinds of hands makes all the difference. 2 Timothy 1 is a challenge for us too to make sure that our new generation, our new Timothys, on whom the vitality of the Church of the future depends, will have the laying on of both hands, joined, the mentoring and nurture that is both ecclesial-structural and personal-familial as well.

The one unchanging faith is passed down across time, generation to generation, with two lines of hands, by the ministry of bishop, priest, and catechist, and by the nurture of mother and father, mentor and friend. 2 Timothy 1 asks of us an inventory of how this can best be done in the culture and place in which we live, and what kind of report card we should receive. Are the churchly ministries we have geared first and foremost to nurturing, discerning, and training the Timothys? In recent years the Episcopal Church has awakened to the dire mistake of a generation ago to discourage young vocations to the ordained ministries. Go away, get a job, come back in a decade we would tell our would be Timothys and Timotheas, and return they never did. I was the rector of a parish next door to a traditional Episcopal college, which for decades had encouraged dozens of vocations in a lively Canterbury Club. But in the 1960’s, it decided to sell its Gospel patrimony for a bowl of state grant money. What would it mean to have foster a culture in which vocations are a central mission goal for our Church? Do we see that a young generation of orthodox, energetic, mission-fired leaders is the single most potent means for the Holy Spirit to renew the Church?

And secondly, we need to look and think hard about how young people come to faith, or don’t, in the informal, personal, familial ways in our culture. It is in this regard that I have been helped recently by reading After the Baby Boomers, by the renowned sociologist of religion at Princeton, Robert Wuthnow. This is not theology, it is chock full of number and cold-blooded analysis, and we need that too in order to plan effective reevangelism. I like the book because there is something in it to displease everyone. The book has everything to do with how we as families spread the Gospel, and how we as the structured Church do so as well. The post-baby boom generation, according to Wuthnow, are open to traditional belief; the conservative is happy with this, though right away we learn that they don’t know much about it, nor to be inclined to join. The liberals among usmight be pleased to hear that they are statistically likely to be of more progressive social and political opinion, but are less likely to attend a mainline church than their peers.

But the decisive factors lie elsewhere. We as a culture assume that our twentysomethings will set out on their own. Consequently they are the least likely to be rooted in a local community. Add to that the greater number of times they move, the later age at which they marry, and the likelihood of fewer children, and it adds up to diminished odds that they will show up at the door of your church. Add to this the diminished odds that a close preexisting web of family or friends will witness to them. All this amounts to a daunting challenge, syas Wuthnow, to those who would involve this generation in traditional religious activities.

I believe that our Anglican Church has in recent decades suffered from what the philosophers call a category confusion. By that they mean offering a different kind of answer than the question can afford. Many have imagined that relevance to our culture requires an editing of our doctrinal claims and ethical commitments. The problem of course is that one no longer has an identity to inhabit the space you have carved out for yourself. Relevance does matter, but it properly lies in a different sphere.

With the help of this insight of this sort from a secular science, and in the spirit of Timothy, patron saint of the young Christian adult, our mandate is clear. Nashville is not Toronto, but I suspect that this same mandate stretches across North America. We need to accept that their lives are shaped as they are. We then need to find the ways and means to witness to this generation. What are the equivalents of the Shangazi and Mjomba, , forms of more personal connection within which the Gospel can be conveyed in this more informal kind of apostolic succession. What are the structures of the Church community which promote and complement these forms? Where are to find this generation at the point of their availability and need? At the very least we need to ask those we know and listen. We need to study how the Eunices and Loises of their lives have managed to connect, we need to make their cultivation our top priority. Their demographic may be new, but the need of their hearts for the saving word has not. 

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